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Matt Milsom, managing director and head of trading for Europe and Asia, has become the latest high-profile derivatives professional to leave J.P. Morgan Chase. Milsom, who came from Chase Manhattan, was offered Asian-based positions following that firm's merger with J.P. Morgan. He resigned at the beginning of the month because he did not want to move to Asia and because positions on offer in Europe were not sufficiently senior, according to an official familiar with the matter. Milsom declined comment.

CDC Ixis Capital Markets is restructuring its credit group to include exotic credit derivatives, such as first-to-default baskets of credit derivatives, and has spun off flow business into a separate group. Francois Mainard, deputy head of global fixed income in Paris, said the restructuring is designed to capture a bigger piece of the burgeoning European credit derivatives market. CDC opted to split the roles because it wants specialists for each department, he added.

Enron plans to begin trading financial derivatives on computer memory out of its London office in the near future. Steve Elliot, president of Enron Broadband Services Europe, said the energy and commodity trading giant presently only trades data capacity out of Houston, but plans to hire a professional to launch its European effort.

The state Treasury of Bundesland Sachsen-Anhalt, a state in Eastern Germany, is set to enter a EUR100 million (notional) interest-rate swaption if one-year futures on 10-year German Bunds trade above 109% of their issue price in the secondary market. It will use the swaption to hedge interest-rate risk on a EUR100 million bond the German regional authority plans to issue in the second half of the year. It has yet to choose counterparties for the swap, according toAxel Gühl, treasurer at Ministerium der Finanzen des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt.

Adam Friedman, equity derivatives marketer at J.P. Morgan in New York, has taken the new position of managing director, equity derivatives marketing to corporates at Bear Stearns in New York. The hire was opportunistic, said Don Martocchio, senior managing director and global head of equity derivatives sales in New York, adding that Bear Stearns has been look to up headcount in this area for some time. Friedman, who reports to Martocchio, is a senior member of an existing team of corporate equity derivatives marketers.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is structuring a synthetic collateralized loan obligation on a EUR1.3 billion (USD1.2 billion) basket of credit default swaps. The deal, dubbed Europower I, is structured on a basket of 130 European names with typical sizes of EUR10 million (USD9.24 million), according to an official familiar with the deal. Officials at MSDW declined all comment.

PointWorth Management Private Ltd. is launching a pan-Asia long/short equity hedge fund. The company, with approximately USD120 million in assets, is considering using over-the-counter equity derivatives, said Dennis See, ceo in Singapore. The fund will focus primarily on equities, but the investment managers will have "broad discretion" in their use of financial instruments, including derivatives.

Goldman Sachs is shopping a USD1 billion (notional) portfolio credit default swap deal. Called Orion, the portfolio gains USD10 million of exposure to each of 100 credits via selling protection in the single-name credit default swap market. Investors can sell five-year protection on tranches of the entire portfolio, with more senior tranches generating less premium. The first loss position is 2.75%. The tranches are unrated according to an official on the buy side.

HSBC is expanding its Asian interest-rate derivatives desk and has hired Samuel Koh, senior regional currency-denominated interest-rate derivatives trader at Citibank in Singapore, in the new position of head of Asian domestic derivatives trading. Anita Fung, director, head of fixed income and derivatives, Asia-Pacific at HSBC in Hong Kong, explained that the firm is gearing up to cash in on the region's economic recovery and plans additional hires.

Credit default swap prices on the Philippines sovereign continued to drop last week, as the country's new government showed signs of being committed to tackling economic problems. One-year credit default swaps on sovereign Philippines traded a few times last week at around 200 basis points, said a trader in Tokyo. Mid-January, before former President Joseph Estrada stepped down, one-year sovereign credit default swaps were trading some 100bps higher, he said.

Frank Iacono, v.p., structured credit products at J.P. Morgan, has taken the new position of senior v.p., head of synthetic CDO trading at Lehman Brothers in New York. In his new position, Iacono will be the senior member of an existing structured credit trading group that structures and trades synthetic CDOs in North America. He will also have some marketing responsibilities. Jim Ballentine, managing director and co-head of U.S. credit trading for Lehman, said demand for structured credit product has grown over the last year, prompting his firm to add a senior trader. A large number of credit defaults in the past year has made investors look more closely at credit derivatives and structured finance as a tool for risk management.